Many organizations need to track the business opportunities of their sales force. By tracking various business opportunities, an organization can forecast business statistics such as revenue and product quantities based on those opportunities. In addition, organizations generally would like to monitor how their actual revenue relates to their forecasted revenue based on actual-to-forecasted business statistics. By monitoring actual revenue, an organization can determine whether it is on track to meet its forecasted revenue. If it is not on track, then the organization can take appropriate actions.
Traditionally, each salesperson in an organization would need to define reports containing the information needed to analyze their forecasted revenues. Depending on the complexity of the reports, it may take considerable time for a computer system to perform the computation necessary to generate the reports. When a salesperson submits a request to run a report, the resulting report may be displayed to the salesperson only after the report is completely generated. In the meantime, the salesperson may be stuck waiting for the report. Moreover, the report may provide only a small part of the information needed by a salesperson to analyze their forecasted revenues. For example, a report may list aggregate forecasted revenue by each region with an organization. A sales manager may not only want to review the aggregate forecasted revenue but also simultaneously review opportunity information of certain salespersons. When a report includes graphical information, a salesperson may want to analyze the underlying data used to generate the graphical information. To accomplish that analysis, the salesperson may need to define a new report for the needed information.
It would be desirable to have a system that would provide a salesperson a comprehensive view of the information needed to analyze their business opportunities, to allow the salesperson to drill down into the supporting details, and to provide the information in a way not unduly delayed by computations that take a considerable amount of time.